Clothes make the man

A caricature from George Cruikshank’s Comic Almanack satirizes dandified fashions in his era. The drawing was part of Dressed to Express: Costume in Victorian Illustration, an exhibit created by students in Professor Catherine Golden’s honors class on the Victorian illustrated book. The display, in the Tang Museum last spring, featured illustrations from Scribner Library’s Fox Collection of Victorian-era books, along with some period clothing borrowed from the Saratoga Springs Historical Society. Students wrote accompanying text to explain how “the language of clothing” was used to express class status, gender identity, and social codes and expectations.